The Invaders (Kay-Bee Productions, Mutual Film Corporation, 1912)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, January 25) my husband Charles and I watched two films on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase,” hosted by Jacqueline Stewart. They were both Westerns, a three-reeler (about 40 minutes) from 1912 called The Invaders and William S. Hart’s last film, Tumbleweeds (1925). They were being paired, Stewart explained, because they both had the same screenwriter, C. Gardner Sullivan, who wrote an original “scenario” for The Invaders and adapted a magazine serial by Hal Evarts for Tumbleweeds. (Remember that in the silent era a “scenario” simply meant an overall account of the story and a series of descriptions of how the director could visualize it on screen. Screenwriting became more important once sound came in and producers actually had to have written dialogue to give to the actors.) The Invaders was directed by Francis Ford, who also starred in it as Col. James Bryson; Francis Ford was the older brother of John Ford (their family name back in Ireland was “O’Fearna” and what got written down at Ellis Island was “Feeney”). Francis helped John get his start in the film industry, only for reasons that still are unclear to me Francis’s star fell as John’s rose, and ultimately Francis was given minor roles in John’s films just to keep him alive. The film opens with Col. Bryson signing a treaty with a Native American Sioux chief (played by an actual Native American, William Eagle Shirt) setting aside a stretch of land as a permanent reservation in exchange for the Sioux giving up other land to settlers. As with just about every real-life treaty white Americans ever made with Natives, though, this one is broken – in this case by the builders of the Transcontinental Railroad, who send out a survey team headed by two young men. U.S. Army Lieutenant White (Ray Myers) falls for Col. Branson’s daughter (Ethel Grandin), while a member of the Transcontinental Railroad survey team falls equally hard for the Native chief’s daughter, Sky Star (Ann Little). Unfortunately, Sky Star takes a bad fall off a horse into a ravine and is seriously injured; Branson’s daughter has her taken to the army camp and tries her best to keep her alive, but ultimately she dies.

Meanwhile, the Sioux chief considers the invasion of the Transcontinental Railroad surveyors as either an actual act of war or the precursor to one. He mobilizes his own tribe to attack the fort and cuts a deal with the Sioux’ historic enemies, the Cheyenne, to mount a joint attack on the white fort. The Natives are actually doing pretty well in the battle when Col. Bryson hits on the idea of telling the Sioux chief that they’re holding his daughter hostage and will kill her unless the Native chief calls off the attack, but just as they’ve pretty well convinced, the Sioux chief’s daughter dies anyway. There’s a pitched battle in which a lot of people die, and the outcome is a bit uncertain until Lt. White arrives with the reinforcements he rode to fetch from another white Army fort after the Natives burned the telegraph pole so Col. Bryson’s telegraph operator (Art Acord, who also stunt-doubled for Ann Little in her fatal fall from a horse; men in drag doubling for women was a common practice in Hollywood until 1953, when Doris Day insisted for the film Calamity Jane that her stunt double be a woman, Donna Hall) couldn’t get word to the outside that they were under siege. The Invaders is actually a pretty good movie for 1912, but it was still a 1912 movie and there was virtually no cross-cutting, camera movement, or any of the other ways filmmakers would soon develop to ratchet up the excitement and suspense of action scenes. The Invaders was produced and co-directed by Thomas H. Ince, the man who did more than anyone else to invent the Hollywood studio system in which the producers were the real powers and directors, writers, actors, and everyone else were under contract to major studios and had little say over the artistic decisions of their projects. Ince even built the largest and most grandiose of the early studio complexes, the big lot in Culver City that would be the home of MGM during its glory years in the 1930’s and 1940’s and ultimately would become the property of Sony when it bought Columbia.